Quest for Mind

by Howard Gardner

Discusses the ideas and works of the two leading structuralists on human behavior and mental functioning

Genres: Psychology

300 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He has received honorary degrees from 26 colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, and South Korea. In 2005 and again in 2008, he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. The author of 25 books translated into 28 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be adequately assessed by standard psychometric instruments.

During the past two decades, Gardner and colleagues at Project Zero have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the middle 1990s, in collaboration with psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project-- a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with long time Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James and other colleagues at Project Zero, he is also investigating the nature of trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Among new research undertakings are a study of effective collaboration among non-profit institutions in education and a study of conceptions of quality, nationally and internationally, in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art on the topic "The True, The Beautiful, and The Good: econsiderations in a post-modern, digital era."

from http://www.howardgardner.com/bio/bio....

Reviews

[Logn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 but i should have read this before my lcsw exam because i was so bad at piaget's stages

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a struggle to understand Gardner's discussion of "the structuralist mind." There's a lot of detail, similarities and contrasts, but there's not much here in the way of a big picture. We know generally that a structuralist looks "for underlying regularities among disparate phenomena," but wonder how this differs from how most thinkers approach their subject. For the structuralists, these underlying regularities have universal features and we gather from Gardner, at least faintly, that these come from our biology, but this is less clear with Levi-Strauss than with Piaget.

In this book (mental structures are extensions of underlying biological structures discussed by Piaget in "Biology and Knowledge"), Piaget's structures are mental systems that combine internal need and interest with actions to satisfy them. When the actions do not fit, the structures - the repertoire of actions - are modified so that there is an adaptation to what the external world requires. Through this process of structural modification, the child moves from reflexive action and trial and error to internal actions that match need and interest with external phenomena (e.g., a ball to throw), to hypothetical knowledge (a ball that could be thrown), to formal thought (abstract manipulation of symbols and deductive reasoning). Piaget refers to this as genetic epistomology because this development that allows thought to apply to a broader world occurs over time.

As the child moves from random trial and error actions to intentional mental actions (wanting a ball and knowing where to find it), the child has to somehow convert desire into a representation that can be mentally operated on. As the adolescent moves into more formal (abstract) thought, this role of mental representation is more important. How this conversion of object to mental representation occurs physiologically is not touched upon by Gardner (even with the neuroscience of today, this is not much discussed), but it (lifting action to thought) does seem to be a crucial pivot point to understanding more fully how Piaget's theory works.

The discussion of Levi-Strauss's structuralism is not enlightening. Apparently, he's a struggle to understand. Gardner says of Levi-Strauss' "The Savage Mind" that his writing is "enormously erudite, recondite" and the book "moves uncontrollably out of focus even after numerous readings." Gardner says that Levi-Strauss sees myth representing underlying structures that categorizes (inclusions, exclusions; compatibilities, incompatibilities), contrasts (oppositions) and correlations. At first glance, that seems like fairly ho hum stuff (is this all that unknown to us?) and if Levi-Strauss sees these as universal structures, they seem remarkably void - at least as described by Gardner - of any biological basis. Yet, it's intriguing to see Levi-Strauss' theory as almost dialectical in operation: the mind categorizes and seeks to resolve differences by explaining via myth or adjusting the story line to accommodate what the world presents to the self. Thinking about this further, there is a similarity with Piaget's thought as well. We act in the world; the world acts back and we adjust our action and understandings as a result. While Gardner does not take the discussion here, perhaps the universal, biologically based, underlying structure is this dialectical interaction with the world. This matches up with species evolution and the pre-mental activity that goes along with survival, with practical intelligence (learning to solve real-world problems), and with theoretical thought (the application of formal thought to understandng the objective world of science).